When Will I Be A Proper Grown Up?

At 45, Sarfraz Manzoor realises he's still not got life 'sorted'

‘You know you’re getting old,’ goes the old Bob Hope joke, ‘when the candles cost more than the cake.’

I will be 45 next birthday. This fact feels so utterly unbelievable that I had to have a short pause to look over that last sentence, because it didn’t seem plausible. Forty-five is inarguably middle-aged.

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When I was younger I assumed that by the time I was 45 I’d have things worked out, that the questions that troubled me during my teens, twenties and thirties – about what love was and how to find it, about how to live a creatively meaningful life and how to deal with my family without being driven to madness – would all be resolved.

I have spent so much of my life waiting for my life to truly begin. When I was in my twenties I was single and just starting on my career, so I was desperate to reach my thirties when, I assumed, things would really get going. And then I got to my thirties and I had girlfriends and a fairly decent career, but I didn’t fully appreciate it because I thought grown-up life only started when one got married and had a family.

And now I find I have the whole package – the wife, the child and the mortgage – and yet, rather than feeling like I’ve reached the destination, I am suddenly reminded I’m on the start of another journey.

When I was young and began to panic about my health, I could tell myself I was a hypochondriac, but by the time you get to your forties you’d be daft not to be vigilant.

I thought that after I found a woman willing to marry me, I’d learnt all I needed about love; but in fact the hardest questions – how to make love last amid the challenges of children and familiarity – are things I’ve yet to figure out.

I thought that once I had landed upon a job I loved, I knew all there was to know about work, and yet the harder challenge is not falling into a rut when you have been doing the same thing for two decades.

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I thought, when I was a boy, that by the age of 45 I’d have worked out how to deal with my parents, and yet what I’d never contemplated is that I would lose my father while still in my early twenties, or that by the time I was 45 my mother would be in her early eighties and not only physically frail but also starting to fade mentally.

It is unnerving to be reaching 45 and to realise that, in many ways, I know less than I ever did. The only time I truly feel like an adult is when I am with my daughter. Laila is four years old, the age when children enjoy firing questions at their parents. It can be exhausting but also rather lovely because my daughter is young enough to assume I really do know everything – to her I am Google in human form.

There is a simplicity about her world. She still believes that every stranger would want to see the blazing-red autumn leaf she delightedly found on the street; when she sees a photograph of our wedding day and asks where she is and I reply that she was with the angels, she accepts this to be the truth.

One of the greatest pleasures of being a parent is that I get to vicariously enjoy a time when every question had a straightforward answer.

The rest of the time I feel like I am a continual work in progress. That, I have finally accepted, is how I am likely to always feel: being an adult is about understanding and embracing that I am never going to feel like I have it all sorted.

The truth is, as we get older, we don’t get much nearer to discovering any answers – we just get faced with new questions.

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